To some extent, Gadi Amit, the tech-design guru who owns New Deal Design and helms the team behind devices like Fitbit, is letting go. His latest project forced him to.

It’s called Project Ara, a smartphone concept that began as a Motorola product before Google bought the company. Project Ara strays from Amit’s string of simple, elegant, self-contained products. This phone is not like a fitness band or a more efficient camera; it doesn’t solve a single, immediate goal and then step out of the way.

Rather, Project Ara demands experimentation and customization, forcing everyone outside of the Project Ara team to become the phone’s designers. In Amit’s eyes, especially in the modern phone era, that has become the point. The mission, even.

“Digital and electronic objects want to be modular,” Amit said from his office in San Francisco. “Computers used to be that way; even game consoles had modules. As tech became miniaturized, compact, and dense in mobile phones—essentially, our modern day computers—the ability to customize and have an open market for components and upgrades diminished really rapidly.”

As we’ve written before, Project Ara bucks the trend for pre-built smartphones by breaking them into disparate, connectable parts. There's the “endoskeleton,” a milled-aluminum base with minimal circuitry, and there are “modules,” essentially 20mm by 20mm self-contained blocks that connect to the endo and contain just about every element you’d expect in a modern phone. The modules provide all the different phone functions: one's a camera; that one’s a processor; this bigger one’s a battery; then there's the antenna, the speakers, and so on.

"Between two and 20 million"

Amit described this setup as the perfect halfway point between the extremes of phone customization: buying a pre-made phone with only memory as a variable or having a one-of-a-kind phone made to your specifications. When pressed about the tighter, more realistic compromises New Deal and Google made before reaching the announced version of Ara, Amit said the biggest challenge was making sure so many disparate parts could work together.

“If we’re producers, you can’t develop a module that violates the space or model of a module that I built,” Amit said. He pointed out the phone’s final, square-grid approach and its associated rules that prevent, say, antenna-based modules from interfering with each other’s signals or needs. “We’re talking about modularity not only in current times but also in future times.”

In case anyone assumes the whole project is vaporware, Amit took the opportunity to reaffirm announcements that “between two and 20 million” Project Ara sets will “begin shipping in the first half of 2015.” That’s important, because Amit still couched many of his feelings about Project Ara with “if” statements, which he clarified: “if it becomes a fully clear success, if it becomes a de facto new standard.”

Some of the most daunting potential issues with Project Ara include its roughly 25 percent added bulkiness, the cost, and energy drain for this modular phone when split up piecemeal when compared to similar, all-in-one smartphones today. Those issues are likely to persist through Ara’s initial retail launch, but “if we see a two-sided market, including participation from hundreds of thousands of developers, then size, add-on costs, power consumption, all of those issues will be defused over time,” Amit said.

Two audiences to build Ara

That means Amit has a doubly difficult task. He must convince both an audience of phone buyers and a crowd of modular block manufacturers that Project Ara is worth investing in. He ruminated on the possibilities that 3D printing will add to the platform, not just in letting users print their own custom colors and casings on the backs of pre-made modules but in the near-future possibilities of users printing full, working modules like antennas and USB connectors.

When pressed about the current endoskeleton lineup and how it appears to limit creative device customization—essentially, everything you’d attach to the phone will have an ideal, expected place and use—Amit merely reiterated the expandability of Ara’s hot-swappable modules. Swap a standard camera with a telemetric lens when you’re at a concert. Keep batteries handy to pop right in.

That’s enough customization in Amit’s eyes to make Project Ara followers invest greatly in the platform. He believes that speaks to the project’s divergence from other New Deal Design initiatives. As the central hub of our connected lives, smartphones don’t “blend in to” our day-to-day activities the way a fitness band might.

If we’re going to invest in our phones in the form of usage, then users deserve to have a few other investment doors opened up, as well, Amit said. That's why he's ultimately most comfortable taking on a seemingly new design challenge.

“There’s a strong psychological effect for something you customize and tailor,” Amit said. “If you are assembling an Ikea chair, even though the chair isn't of the highest quality, you still feel for it much more. Hands-on experience is something a lot of people cherish. It’s the democratization of design.”